6 Shot, 2 Killed Overnight In New Haven & Hamden

Be careful what you wish for, lefties , because we in the cities have to live with your Marxist dreams of the "withering" away of govt to create the communistic utopia; while you sip your lattes in the wealthy towns.
No police for us while you are tucked away in the woods or gated homes, crying to abolish police.

YOU worry about climate change and WE have to take the bus because we can't afford the gas...
Yes, lefties, you will fight for "justice" --- to the last drop of OUR blood!

@CityYankee When I drive around in the 'burbs I notice that the majority of Black Lives Matter lawn signs are in wealthy all-white neighborhoods, obviously placed by armchair liberals (aka limousine liberals). Of course they'll fight to keep zoning restrictions that ensure their towns remain all-white.

So sad for the people hurt and who passed away. Defund the police. Real smart idea. Handcuff the police so they can't do anything. It's so sad in America. I can't even have my kids go to the park and play basketball because something might happen. We need to do a better job in our communities. We can't have this happening. Take back our streets. If you can't act like a human and have to shoot up everyone then you don't belong free. Parents take care of your kids. The police are not the bad guys.

All these folks coming up from NY making it un-affordable for long term CT residents - once they find out it's far more violent and crime ridden out here - they will wonder why they left NY in the first place.

Believe me, after 34 years living out here I ask myself the same question...

I appreciate the Independent providing names and dates of death for persons murdered up to this time in 2021. This reminds us that each person killed was an individual rather than a statistic. It would be even more helpful to supplement this information with status of police investigation or charges filed in the case of each deceased person.

City Yankee and others have it exactly wrong when they characterize activists as out-of-town and out-of-touch.

When I go out to marches, rallies, and other events in New Haven - where I live - I see fellow New Haveners striving to make their city a better, safer place, from the folks at Ice the Beef to the amazing youth organizers and others.

Meanwhile, the CCDL literally is 'tucked away in the woods' of Groton and has nothing constructive to say while the proliferation of firearms is taking so many lives here in the city.

Next…

Mr. Schaefer, I think the color you are looking for in suburbia of today is GREEN. You got money? You can buy there. The rest of us? Not a chance. I know it is important to find racism around every corner but I suspect classism is more and more the real culprit.

New Haven is facing a surge in gun violence the same as other cities and communities across this country. This country has a problem with weapons that no other developed country across this planet has.
New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport, Meriden, Hamden, New Britain, Waterbury and New London are some of the communities with the most stories about shootings. It's no accident that these municipalities also have the highest amounts of low incomes, public housing, healthy food deserts, lead poisoning, social services, pollution, asthma rates, summer heat indexes, high unemployment rates, lower graduation rates, segregated housing and education, jobs that don't pay a living wage, and higher crime. When you look at maps of CT focusing on the summer heat index, asthma rates, poverty rates, lack of trees and green living things, and other social and environmental stressors, and crime rates you'll see very clearly that the negative things are almost all concentrated in cities and a few towns. http://www.hartfordinfo.org/issues/wsd/SmartGrowth/CT_Metropatterns_English.pdf
And
https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-news-viz-urban-tree-benefits-20190411-qgaywvuwovhmtdbdpv6m5ygqvm-story.html?outputType=amp
And
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/102557/leveraging-the-built-environment-for-health-equity.pdf
And
https://www.ctdatahaven.org/sites/ctdatahaven/files/DataHaven_GNH_Community_Index_2019.pdf
There are many things that contribute to gun violence, add to them the rising anxiety and depression and substance abuse levels from 2019-2021, economic issues, social unrest, and other social stressors that were aggravated by the pandemic, and many young people with nothing positive or constructive to do with their time, prisoners returning to society after their sentence has ended or were released due to the pandemic with little support, the glorification of gun violence and motorized vehicles drag racing and riding recklessly and other machismo displays.

I agree with Mstata - important that NHI lists all the homicide victims this year to date in our city. Much like the Botanical Garden of Healing in Memory of Victims of Gun Violence, it reminds us that this violence is not something to be swept under the rug or ignored. We must not stand idly by as these lives are lost. We need to support organizations like Ice the Beef, CT Violence Intervention Project, and Project Longevity that are actively working to end the violence. We need to support the new re-entry program to help people released from prison integrate successfully into community life. We also need to support mental health and trauma services.

I also agree that it would be good to have a listing of the status of the investigations of each homicide. If not at the end of each article about a homicide, at least in a periodic update.

@ CityYankee

No "lefties" are advocating the "withering away of govt to create the communistic utopia." In fact it was a Reagan Republican thought leader, Grover Norquist, who advocated "drowning government in a bathtub" by defunding social services. It is precisely the right-wing redefinition of "government" as "law and order" by adversarial, militarized means, while "starving the beast" of the social safety net, consumer protections, education, and the common good, that has brought us to this point.

You may recall that the US Constitution declares its purpose as "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." You might ponder, for a while, what that might actually look like if it were widely acknowledged that justice, domestic tranquility, the general welfare, and a more perfect union in general, required not only law enforcement but a whole range of diverse and creative applications of our resources, beginning with a decent level of dignity and opportunity for all.

And by the way, I have lived in the City of New Haven for 49 years, my children went to New Haven public schools, and I have never "sipped" (or otherwise ingested) a latte in my life.

Dear Gretchen, then why is the "defund/ abolish the police" movement so popular with the left? You can't do that and have "... a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." I am not tranquil with criminals on the loose with no restraint; nor am I at liberty when we live in fear.

Btw, thank you for a very thoughtful reply. I am trying to stick to one topic at a time, rather than go off on tangents. .... but lattes are sipped because they are hot!

Let's set a few sparks to this straw man that City Yankee is trying to construct.

'Defund the police' is not a monolith. A recent Pew poll showed that 34% of Democrats buy into it, and 18% of the population as a whole - furthermore, as blunt as the slogan sounds (more on this in a minute), 'defund the police' means different things to different people. For some, it means abolishment; for others, it means restructuring budgets of local police departments to ensure that cops aren't being sent out to deal with situations that may be more appropriately handled by trained social workers. Many police officers themselves are open to this latter approach.

And of course, Yankee's argument here is specific - that local and national calls to 'defund the police' have led to a rise in violent crime in our fair city. The only thing he's missing is evidence. By how much was the NHPD's budget reduced as a direct result of 'defund the police?' Have there been interviews with cops and department heads that say 'because of this movement, we haven't been able to do x, y, and z and this has led to a rise in crime?' All I'm hearing is that Yankee is blaming 'Marxists' and 'defund the police' because it feels right to him (google: 'truthiness').

Lastly, let's compare 'defund the police' with a rejoinder that we often hear from the right - 'the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.' The logical extrapolation here is to contend that America will not have reasonable levels of public safety unless and until every law-abiding American citizen is permanently equipped with a high-powered weapon that they are expertly trained to operate at a moment's notice - in school, in the synagogue, in the workplace. How is that any less of a blunt object than 'defund the police?' And yet it has been the rationale for policies at every level of government and responsible, I would argue, for far greater quantities of death and suffering than 'defund the police.'

City Yankee- I would say that the "defund the police" slogan is a polarizing statement that is interpreted differently by different people. It is unfortunate choice of words that doesn't adequately express the communities wishes for the future of how we want calls to be handled that currently are being handled by the police.
I would say "police reform" attempts didn't address the systemic racism, bias and human error, nor did it address the substance abuse, mental health or homeless issues that create calls to the police to handle. It also didn't address the militarization of police gear, weapons, training and tactics that increasingly permeate our police departments.
I would argue that "transform the police" is a more comprehensive terminology that asks our society to change policing as we know it to a more humane approach and asks for a crisis response team to address specific types of calls, and funding to be redirected to social services support systems to address the societal issues that we are currently underfunding, and asks for retraining of police to address systemic racism, sexism, bias, gender-ism, able-body-ism, the "blue code of silence" and other issues that are being raised as problematic.
We have a long way to go to figure out how to change the systems we have created to handle social ills, and we will need to think of creative solutions and new ways of handling things. Change is hard, but we can no longer accept the current system as it is.

Dear Heather, words mean things. "Defund the police" means take away money from police, which translates to poorer service. That is quite clear to me. If there are other meanings like what you explained, then different words should be used and people need to be more careful with how they phrase things. 15 second blurbs on media and in comments do not help either but it appears we are no longer able to have civil discussions without recriminations, ad hominem attacks, and insulting disparagement of people who dare to voice an opinion some others might not like. Having to listen to others is a result of our free speech amendment and our democratic process. I I find it increasingly difficult to read the evasive distracting "what about this and what about that" retorts that are designed to deflect and confuse the issues.
Those who do not care to allow disagreement might find the methods of other nations more to their liking but this is how we do it here in America.

City Yankee- I agree it is an unfortunate choice of words for the slogan that has multiple interpretations by different people. Not everyone who uses that slogan agrees on its meaning. Democracy and social movements and change is messy, and it involves lots of people from lots of different perspectives, who may not all agree on everything.
I agree that the "what about-ism" is frustrating and not helpful in discussing an issue. The "gotcha" sound bites that the media and the social media platforms use to try to grab people's attention and get "likes" or viewers or readers isn't helpful to thoughtful discussions and disagreements. One of the reasons I like the comments in the NHI is most of the time commenters aren't insulting or rude, just passionately arguing the topics, the causes, the solutions, or their differing perspectives. We can agree to disagree here without being threatened or called names. I enjoy a good discussion of differing viewpoints and the contributions of people who offer data, facts, opinions, suggestions, and experiences that give our community a chance to understand each other's perspectives, even if we don't always agree, we all care about our city and the surrounding towns well being.

Agreed, Heather. I myself am guilty of not being not but I am trying to reform!!! It's just so hard to be nice. But most of us do share a common interest in our community being great. We just disagree how and, as people on the sidelines, we think we know everything and have no idea how hard it is to govern and get things done. If more of us did the work we claim to know so much of, I think we would have a far greater appreciation for those who put themselves out there and try!!
So, everybody --- try to be constructive and try to be nice about it!!